Degenerate music

The term Degenerate Music ( Degenerate Art to analog) that was specified during the period of National Socialism, especially the musical modernism, which contradicted the ideology of the Nazis. Nazism in the German Reich saw himself not only as a political but also as a cultural movement that broke deliberately with the cultural pluralism of the Weimar Republic.

Modern composers were denigrated as so-called representatives of the degenerate music, ostracized and persecuted on political grounds, including " non-Aryan " artists such as Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff and Ernst Toch, but also " Aryan " composers such as Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky. The works already deceased artists such as Alban Berg were affected.

Exhibition

Had conducted for their opening Richard Strauss be Festive Prelude (1913 ) - - Accompanying the Reich Music Festival in May 1938 in Dusseldorf organized Hans Severus Ziegler following the Munich exhibition of "Degenerate Art" of 1937, the exhibition " Degenerate Music", in which he railed against jazz, new music and Jewish artists and composers and their removal from the German musical life demanded. Then the exhibition in Weimar, Munich and Vienna was shown. The poster used the Ludwig ( Lucky ) Tersch -made caricature of a black jazz saxophonist who wears a Star of David. This motif also contributed to the rushing booklet to accompany the exhibition with the inscription Degenerate Music - An accounting of State Dr. HS Ziegler.

Fifty years later, Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth have reconstructed the exhibition; The opening was held at the Tonhalle Düsseldorf on 16 January 1988. The reconstructed exhibition has since been shown worldwide ( U.S. version, 1991, Spanish version in 2007, new German version in 2007 under the title " The suspect Saxophone "). In addition, appeared next to the exhibition catalog, which consists of 4 CDs Audiovisual Documentation "Degenerate Music".

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